Race-baiting hooks 2012 campaign

TAMPA, Fla. — During three-plus years of Barack Obama’s presidency, neither he nor most top Republicans felt much desire to talk about race.

Now, the three-plus days of the Republican National Convention in Tampa are being roiled by angry people in both parties eager to talk about race — and how the other side is trying exploit prejudice for political advantage.

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A gusher of self-righteous accusations and indignant denials, playing out prominently in news media coverage, has taken what had been a below-the-surface reality of 2012 and put it on naked display: Both Obama and Mitt Romney are keenly conscious of how the nation’s partisan and ideological divides track closely with racial ones, and have crafted strategies designed to ensure that different racial groups vote in the numbers they need.

Many Democrats believe Romney’s decision to inject welfare into the campaign — with a factually inaccurate ad claiming Obama had reversed Clinton-era work requirements — was an unmistakable, if coded, effort to imply that the first black president stands for handouts for lazy people.

Combined with a recent lead-balloon joke by Romney about controversy over Obama’s birthplace, Democrats have concluded that Romney is making deliberate appeals to prejudiced whites.

Many Republicans — with years of resentment over how they believe Democrats and the media seek to throw them on the defensive on racial issues — howled that Vice President Joe Biden was exploiting racial fears when he told a majority-black audience in Virginia that the GOP’s Wall Street allies want to “put you all back in chains.”

All the talk of code words highlights one irony of 2012: Race is proving more toxic as a subtext to the election than it did in 2008, when Obama’s status as the first African-American major-party nominee was usually celebrated, even by many Republicans, as a sign of racial progress.

But in the hair-trigger politics of 2012, the debate in recent days has prompted both parties to point fingers as if the ghost of George Wallace were advising the opposition’s campaign.

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a leading Obama surrogate and head of the Democratic Governors Association, said over the weekend: “When you have a party that says coded things, that makes totally false ads up, falsely saying the president is trying to undo welfare reform, I think you’re going to see a lot of heavily and not-so-subtly coded messages from the Romney-Ryan campaign.”